Jon Ronson

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

This book is based on a recent television series and covers pretty much
the same ground. Probably many people have heard of the "remote viewing"
experiments that were apparently carried out by the US military over a
number of years. These were intended to provide information about enemy
activities by paranormal means. As Ronson's account makes plain,
however, there is more to the story than remote viewing and, although
much of it is pure comedy, there are also darker overtones. Ronson's
claim is that the obscenity of the torture perpetrated at Abu Ghraib by
American troops had its roots in the bizarre ideas he encountered among
the people he spoke to.

Perhaps my favourite character in the book is General Stubblebine, whose
ambition when he was a serving officer was to walk through walls. This,
he thought, was quite a reasonable thing to try to do. After all, there
are relatively huge amounts of space between the atoms of solid objects;
he was made of atoms and so was the wall, so it ought to be possible
for one set of atoms to pass through the other. The general spent a lot
of time walking into walls but this resulted only in a sore nose.
Stubblebine concluded that this must be because he had not tuned his
consciousness sufficiently.

The "goat staring" alluded to in the title refers to attempts to kill
goats by gazing at them in a particular way. Ronson met a civilian who
claimed to be able to do this and to have demonstrated it to the
military. For Ronson's benefit he did some staring at a hamster, though
not with the intention of actually killing it. The experiment was
inconclusive.

If it seems surprising that the US military should have become involved
in such bizarre undertakings, their origin seems to have been the New
Consciousness movement in California in the 1970s. Ronson visited a
retired lieutenant-colonel called Jim Channon, who during his service
spent two years in that environment and then suggested forming the First
Earth Battalion. This was to have been based on the premise that
soldiers could carry baby lambs into hostile territory in order to
pacify the enemy. Channon realized that this might not be enough,
however, so loudspeakers could be mounted to broadcast "discordant
sounds" to confuse the enemy, and if all else failed the troops could
have recourse to lethal weapons; this would not entail bad karma for
them since they would have no choice. They would also be expected to take
part in rituals, wearing special robes.

Channon was actually offered the chance of forming such a batallion, but
he wisely turned it down. However, his ideas continued to influence
military thinking. Ronson believes that it was idealistic theories of
this kind that later became perverted to give rise to the practices at
Abu Ghraib. Here and elsewhere, including at the siege at Waco, loud
discordant music was used as an offensive weapon. Other methods may have
been used as well: Ronson spoke to a British man who was held at
Guantanamo and who may have been the subject of experiments with
subliminal sounds.

This is a (mostly) funny book but also a disturbing one. There are many
stories about the crazy ideas that were current in Nazi circles in the
Third Reich, but it is easy to ascribe them to an irrational streak
within Nazism itself. It is alarming to think that equally crazy ideas
are so deeply embedded in the modern American military.